Old fogies might worry about wireless pickpockets and dead batteries, but the next generation is crying out to be able to buy stuff on their mobile phones, according to Alcatel-Lucent.
The company's Youth Lab - a research arm limited to those born between 1977 and 1998 - found that almost 90 per cent of youth would happily pay a …

BS!!!!!!!!!

"almost 90 per cent of youth would happily pay a monthly fee for for a mobile-phone wallet, mainly for the privilege of not having to wait in line for movie tickets."

BS - Nobody our age goes to the bloody cinema any-more, we aint living in the '30s any-more, granddads!*

Not seen a flick on the "big screen" for about 8 years, I like to you know, eat food that isn't flavoured expanded polystyrene and to be able to actually see and hear the film , plus I like the option of being able to do a number 1 or even a 2 without missing anything!

We have these things called DVDs and the interwebtubes you know, and I can sit right in front of the telly should I need it to look really big!

*Obviously some still do but they live in places like Staines and Slough where seeing a film on a giant telly thingy is still literally the most exciting thing to do in the whole town!

RE: BS!!!!!!!!!

...to say nothing of the fact that we can already buy cinema tickets online. We can even buy bus tickets online and bank online. Assuming your mobile phone can browse the web, we can do pretty much everything they're touting already!

Yes, but...

... can we do so like with, as the parlance hath it, the same properties as the old walk up and buy tickets for cash? That is, without laying our entire and complete identity bare for the next sql injector armed "rogue security researcher", or those wily chaps from some eastern european identity fencing conglomerate? Or for government types with their splendid data security track records.

Fix that and online and "electronic" transactions become a lot more safe and secure. Because it isn't what I have got to hide, it's what I have to lose if the trust I am forced to put into merchants' data handling turns out to be misplaced. As it inevitably will. "Lay your identity on the till" implies having to do it everywhere, and that's a losing game for everyone, eventually, but inevitably.

Demographic chasm

Compare "The company's Youth Lab - a research arm limited to those born between 1977 and 1998" from this article with "Westerners in the 40-59 age bracket (as the Boomers now are)" from here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/28/baby_boomers_do_the_decent_thing/

Where does that leave those of us born between 1971 and 1976? What is our label? The forgotten generation!!!

Youth 1977?

My thoughts exactly...

(Well, not exactly, I wasn't thinking about your wife. Not that there is anything wrong with her! *insert any "So you're saying you fancy my wife? So now you're saying she's ugly?" scene from a film here*)

I was born in '77 and haven't considered myself a "youth" for quite some time... Not that I would want to be still considered to be a "youth" either, not if todays actual "yoof" is anything to go by!

Yabbut

The thing that gets me

is that this is not new revenue. It's merely moving a fixed amount of purchasing power from one stream to another. If the operators get a slice of this, then it will be by 'stealing' it from someone else.

What I keep seeing is that businesses believe that they are making new money by offering this type of service. This is just plain wrong.

If I buy a cinema ticket, I do not want to pay more to buy it using my phone. Realistically, people actually believe that they will pay less with new transaction types, especially if they are paying a monthly fee for the privilege. And more interested parties will be taking a piece of the action.

Time is indeed money, but only up to a point.

And sometimes, it's nice knowing that the £50 in my wallet is still there as long as I don't spend it. Someone might steal it, but nobody can legitimately spend it without my knowledge. I'm almost afraid to look at my bank account sometimes, because I have so many direct debits and other transactions, often on irregular days of each month. I think that the same will be true of any e-payment system.

Why do I get the feeling...

With China, Malaysia, Singapore and VietNam having the death penalty ...

you can be assured that I buy (or use) no recreational drugs.

Besides, VietNam has it's very own poppy fields along it's borders with Cambodia and Laos and the evil weed is openly smoked in the north-west of the country - even by old ladies whose 'joints' resemble large cigars.

P.S. China no longer bill victims families for the bullet (but they harvest the bodies for spare parts) and VietNam uses a single bullet. Malaysia and Singapore use the rope.

NFC

PayPal—ugh!

“… has more respect for … PayPal …” Are they really that naïve?

Draft Media Release re PayPal

“It is with great sadness that eBay’s Chief Headless Turkey, John Donahoe, announces the probable demise of eBay’s most ugly daughter, PayPal. Donahoe says that PayPal has been stricken by particularly virulent strains of Visa+CyberSource and Mastercard Open Platform, and these afflictions are greatly aggravated by PayPal’s insurmountable lack of direct financial institutions support and a great deal of PayPal user dissatisfaction, particularly with respect to PayPal’s grossly unfair, “all responsibility avoiding” user agreement, totally primitive risk management processes, and grossly unprofessional, usually buyer-biased, fraud-facilitating (indeed, non existent) transactions mediation, to name just a few of the problems that PayPal merchants have to endure.

“Donahoe says that PayPal’s health may therefore be expected to deteriorate and, if ultimately not completely incapacitated, will most likely be eventually confined to its mandatory offering on what little there will be, by then, left of the Donahoe-devastated eBay marketplaces. There is no cure for this condition, and the “eBafia Don” is particularly saddened by the inevitable presumption that it is unlikely that PayPal, will be able to continue to underpin eBay’s sagging bottom line too far into the future.”

Yes, it’s a send-up but, still, it accurately describes PayPal’s most unprofessional and “clunky” operation. The fact is, had the developers of the original “bankcard” concept ever behaved the way PayPal behaves towards its payees in particular, credit/debit cards may never have gotten off the ground, and we would probably still be paying for all our purchases with bits of paper and little metal discs.

It should also be emphasized that all the payments processors that do not have the direct underlying support of the financial institutions, as do Visa/Mastercard, suffer the same handicaps that PayPal does. The “banks” may be disliked by some but they at least supply a “professional” payments processing service.

A detailed examination of and prognosis for PayPal, (including a link to the “PayPal Horror Tour”) at:

Youth?

I was born in 1977, which makes me 32 years old! In what world does that qualify me as the youth of today?

And I can say that I am most definitely not crying out for NFC payment options. I'm quite happy to use cash or plastic to pay for the majority of things.

I'll put my hand up to having paid for parking once using my phone, but only because I had no change in my pocket.

I assume that the reference to orange 'selling' cinema tickets is aimed at orange wednesday, a 2 for 1 offer that still requires you to 'buy' the ticket in the cinema using a traditional technique of handing over cash or sticking your card in the slot. There's definitely nothing near field about it anyway.

I'll admit that Oyster works well in london, but here in Sheffield giving the conductor cash in exchange for a printed ticket on the tram also seems to be surprisingly effective.